Today, one of our syracuse.com commenters, Sealless, came up with the best way so far.

It appears the county only removed the input fields for a person’s name from its online database. The data is still there. You can search and find the information by following these simple steps:

Go to the county's online database. Sometimes you get a page that has a log in; just hit the button that says click here for public access.

Hit search.

At the end of the URL paste this: &ownernamel=yyyyy. Type the last name that you want to search where the Ys are. If you want to search a first and last name, paste this in: &ownernamel=yyyyy&ownernamef=zzzzz. Type the last name where the Ys are and the first name where the Zs are.

Hit enter.

You are now able to search the public database by a person’s name. This is the same material that is public on the county’s own website in PDFs and that you could search at the Onondaga County courthouse.

The commenter, Sealless, said he's opposed to the county's ban.

"It's just so insulting that (1) they would do this and (2) they would screw it up so badly," he said. "I am a bit embarrassed that I didn't figure this out sooner."

These are the other two ways we have created to help you:

On Monday, we tweaked our real estate database to give you better access to the buyers’ and sellers’ names. You can search for any property that was sold dating back to September 2009.

Today, we posted the tax rolls for Onondaga County in a searchable PDF that will give you expanded information about each property. You can search these documents by property owners’ names. (The search, being on a PDF, isn’t as user-friendly as a database. It can take several minutes or longer to find a person’s name.)

We will continue to explore other ways to help you obtain this public information. We welcome your suggestions, ideas too. Send them to sbillmyer@syracuse.com.